Here’s a movie scene to imagine. It’s the mid 1950s. An early evening sun casts a purple glow on a pink Cadillac as a couple sit close, but not too close in the front seat. Something moody and blue plays on the car radio. The guy is Elvis Presley, in a powder blue sports jacket, dark navy slacks and white suede loafers. At 19, he’s still a boy in some ways, gawky a bit, whose big idea for a date is a movie matinee and a burger after. The girl is Wanda Jackson, just 17, wearing a skirt her mother Nellie stitched, with her jet black bouffant hair puffed like a storm cloud over her head.

Jackson, now 75, has a memory as sharp as a tack and it’s not due to inactivity. Still big in Europe — “keeping my career alive” — she also has a following in Japan. Touring regularly in North America, she’s found a younger audience based on two revival albums — The Part Ain’t Over, produced in 2011 by Jack White and Unfinished Business, her 31st album, produced by Justin Townes Earle last year — that brings her to act to The Cadillac Lounge July 5 and 6, backed by the Rizdales, out of London, Ontario.

Yet she still imagines the movie that might have been made where the camera zooms in to find a tiny ring hanging by a simple necklace around her neck, Presley’s gift to her. In the scene he says he’s really proud of the way she wears it for everyone to see. He says she’s going to be a big star, just as he plans to be. It’s this new thing, this rock ‘n’ roll, he says. Rockabilly some call it. It’s the future, not country. And she believes him. Why, these two look like they just walked off the top of a wedding cake. They’re perfect together. They’ll become the married legends of rock ‘n’ roll, its first royal family, a bigger musical couple than Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, bigger than big.

The scenes are true. But the implied future wasn’t. The future didn’t realize what a good start it had when it had it.

“Ours was a lovely story or so I’ve been told,” Wanda Jackson tells me on the phone some days ago. “Elvis was nice, a real gentleman when we went out. And I was a young lady. He didn’t take advantage of that, or try to. But he showed me that the young people of the time had a voice, that the teenagers were buying the records. It was Elvis himself who changed all that. But I found later I couldn’t get that breakaway song myself.”

She first toured with Elvis in 1955 — her father Tom, acting as chaperon, never far away — when both were appearing on ABC’s Ozark Jubilee. At the time as she was almost as much the star as he was. Precociously talented as a kid guitarist, she had her own radio spot in 1952 in Oklahoma City, where she still lives. By 1954 she was singing with her idol, Hank Thomson.

Also in 1954, she signed a deal with Decca Records, had graduated from Capitol Hill High School and was out on the road, driven from gig to gig by her father in the family Plymouth. She was making maybe $50 dollars a night. Getting out of her Decca deal, Jackson signed with Capitol Records, recording “I Gotta Know,” in 1956, a sweet country tune which partway turning into a screeching rocker. It was a signal that a woman was now in the hip-swivelling rockabilly business too, demanding equal time — and equal pay back.

The song’s sweet-to-tart sexual switcheroo became Jackson’s signature move, subverting the all-male ambience of early rock and challenging male dominance. “Here’s a sweet little love song,” you hear her saying on some vintage YouTube clip, before launching into another blistering musical blowback tune taking on masculinity itself.

She was smart and fearless. And as soon as she was on a roll Jackson did the unthinkable. She recorded “Let’s Have A Party” in 1958, a year after Presley himself had recorded that very tune, as “Party” in the film, Lovin’ You. So much for wearing his ring. “The Queen” — as her agent still calls her — was going after The King. Bursting with butt-kicking defiance, Wanda out hip-swivled Elvis-the-Pelvis. She out sang him too. Concocting a cacophony of vocal acrobatics, Jackson hiccups, yelps and soars through the song in a way that even Little Richard would have found excessive if indeed even physically possible. (An entire subchapter in rock history might be turned over to the many description of Jackson’s voice from “a cat growl,” to “a raving banshee” “hellacious” and “vocal-chord shredding.”)

At a time Presley was heading to the mainstream, Jackson was rocketing straight to the anarchic fringes of rockabilly, where the high octane music was careening in crazy ways like the music industry’s answer to Surrealism. Singers and songwriters could get away with the unimaginably sexual if the lyrics they sang remained unfathomable to parents.

“I never kissed a bear, I never kissed a goon,” Jackson yowls in “Let’s Have A Party,” “but I can shake a chicken in the middle of the room.”

Huh? Was Salvador Dali listening to this? In “Fujiyama Mama” — the hit launching her Japanese career — Jackson ups the ante on double entendres. “I been to Nagasaki, Hiroshima too,” she sings. “The things I did to them baby, I can do to you too ... and when I start erupting ain’t nobody gonna make me stop.”

Talking about blowing one’s mind. And it was entirely embodied in the living, breathing, raunchy soul of classic rock ‘n’ roll. Yet by the early ‘60s, Jackson’s career turned stone cold. “I found I couldn’t get any airplay,” she tells me. “I had a number one song in Japan. But I couldn’t get any support or help from the disc jockeys. And that hurt. Here they were playing Elvis, they were Jerry Lee Lewis, so why weren’t they playing me?”

In fact, rock was chilling out for good with payola scandals and wimpy male stars. Sexy, smart aggressive women it couldn’t handle. The mainstream proved to be where the big money was found, as Elvis himself quickly discovered. When Jackson last met him, it was in 1964 in a Las Vegas hotel where she and her husband Wendell Goodman had a room. Elvis had the rest of the entire floor. The meeting lasted less than a half-hour.

But the times were hardly ready for female sexual self-expression, I suggested to her. Doris Day was managing to retain her virginity from movie after movie. And she, Wanda Jackson, was told to cover her bare shoulders if she ever wanted to appear at the Grand Ole Opry.

“But the songs weren’t all that risque,” she tells me. “There wasn’t that much sexual content.”

In the years following, Jackson has been sustained by her marriage to Goodman — “I wasn’t looking to get married, but he swept me off my feet” — her European success and her return to her country roots, particularly gospel and born-again Christianity. In 2009, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the “early influence” sub-catagory.

“I wasn’t thinking abut how difficult it was being a woman, or how especially hard it was,” Jackson says. ”I wasn’t thinking about plowing new ground or opening new doors. I didn’t think about being different at all.”

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